How to get recommended by Gemini

To be named by Gemini, be findable in Google first, then give it pages that answer the buying question directly. Gemini is grounded in Google's search index, so the work that gets you indexed and ranked is the same work that makes you available to Gemini. Nobody can guarantee a place in its answer.

What Gemini does differently

It reaches through Google. That is the single most useful thing to know about it. Where ChatGPT may or may not search, and uses its own path when it does, Gemini's grounding leans on what Google has already crawled, indexed and ranked.

It also shows links more readily, which makes it easier to audit. You can see which pages it used and check whether they are yours, a competitor's, or a third party list page.

And it is more sensitive to freshness and to location than people expect. A recently updated page and a page that states where you operate both do better on questions with a place in them, which in India is most of them.

What is not public is how the grounding chooses among the pages available, or how Google's AI answers in search relate exactly to Gemini's own retrieval. Treat them as related surfaces that do not always name the same companies, and measure them separately.

What that means for whether you are named

Ordinary technical health is not a side issue here, it is the entry requirement. A page that is not indexed cannot be grounded on, however well written it is. If you are strong in ChatGPT and absent in Gemini, the first place to look is your indexing, not your content.

Google rankings still count, indirectly. If your page is nowhere near the top for the list style queries in your category, Gemini will reach other people's pages instead, and then your presence depends entirely on whether those pages name you.

This also means your existing SEO work is worth more here than anywhere else. The site that was already technically healthy starts ahead, and the site with rendering and indexing problems has to fix those before anything else can help.

What to change

• Confirm your key pages are indexed. Check in Search Console rather than assuming. Fix the ones that are not.
• Keep the sitemap current and link new pages from pages that already get traffic.
• Serve text as plain HTML, so the crawler does not fetch an empty page.
• Add clear structured data where it genuinely applies, and keep it consistent with what the page says.
• If you serve customers in a place, fill in your Google Business Profile properly and keep the hours, address and description current. For local questions this is often the difference.
• Get named on the pages Google already ranks for your category questions, because those are the pages likely to be reached.
• Date your pages and update them properly, because freshness is visible here.

A worked example

One finding from our own work belongs on this page even though we recorded it on another assistant. On 17 September 2026, in a Claude run on the category of clawlaw.in, our sister company, the questions about how to look a case up behaved differently from every other question in the set.

On those, official court portals took every position above any commercial product. The assistant said plainly that no commercial product should rank above the official portal for a question about using that portal.

It matters most on this surface. Gemini reaches through Google, and an official portal is exactly the kind of page Google already ranks first for a question about itself. Where the official source outranks everything, grounding on Google's results means the official source is the answer.

So choose the questions you can actually win here. Not the ones the portal answers, but the ones it leaves open: doing the same job for many companies at once, keeping a record of it, covering more than one court, and anything carrying a place or a company size you can genuinely claim. We have not recorded this test on Gemini itself, so treat the reason as Google's rankings rather than as a rule about Gemini.

Where a place in the question changes everything

Indian buying questions usually carry a location, and that makes four things worth more here than on other surfaces.

One, the Google Business Profile fields. Category, service area, address, hours and description. Fill all five, and keep the description the same sentence you use everywhere else.

Two, a page per place you genuinely serve. Not a template with the city name swapped. A page that says what you do in that place, for whom, with something specific about serving it.

Three, the place named in your own words. Use the form buyers use, including the state where the city name is ambiguous.

Four, local listings and association pages. Chamber and trade body member lists for that city are ordinary web pages that Google already indexes, so they are candidates for retrieval.

The limit on all four: only claim a place you actually serve. A page claiming a city you cannot serve wins a question you then lose, and it makes every other claim on your site less believable.

What this cannot do

Five limits.

No guaranteed placement. Nobody controls whether Gemini names you, and there is no paid route into the answer.

No fix for not being indexed. Until that is solved, nothing else on the list can work, and indexing is decided by Google rather than by you.

No visibility into the grounding logic. It is not published. What we describe is inferred from the links shown and from what changes when a page changes.

No stability between surfaces. Gemini and Google's AI answers in search can name different companies, and behaviour changes over time without notice.

No shortcut through structured data. Markup helps a machine confirm what the page says. It does not make a vague page quotable and it is not a ranking lever on its own.

Common questions

If I rank first in Google, will Gemini name me?

Not automatically. Ranking makes your page available to the retrieval step. Being named still depends on whether your page answers the question clearly and whether other retrieved pages name you.

Do I need a Google Business Profile if I sell software?

If you serve customers in a place and buyers ask with a place in the question, it is worth completing and keeping current. If you are purely remote and questions never carry a location, it matters less.

Does structured data help with Gemini specifically?

Treat it as confirming what your page already states. Add it where it genuinely applies, keep it consistent with the visible text, and do not expect it to substitute for being indexed or being specific.

Is Google's AI answer in search the same as Gemini?

Treat them as two surfaces. They are related and they do not always name the same companies, so keep two columns and do not merge them into one number.

My pages are indexed but Gemini never shows them. Now what?

Compare its links with the Google results for the same question. If it is showing third party list pages, your route in is being added to those pages, which is usually faster than trying to outrank them.

Does updating a page help here more than elsewhere?

Freshness is visible on this surface, so a real update with a visible date is worth doing on the pages that matter. Changing a date without changing the content is not an update and helps nobody.

What to do first

Ask your buyer questions in Gemini blind, without naming your company, in a fresh session. Record who was named and which links were shown.

Then do the comparison that only works for Gemini: run the same question in Google search and put the top results next to the links Gemini showed. The overlap tells you how much of your Gemini position is really a Google ranking problem. It usually explains more than anything else you could check.

Before you write anything new, check Search Console for your key pages. An unindexed page is the one problem on this list that makes every other fix pointless. Keep Gemini in its own column, never averaged with other assistants, because the gap between assistants is the diagnosis.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.